I'm originally from Kenya. We used to have a joke

"If it happens in Africa it is called corruption. If it happens in the US it is called lobbying".

I remember seeing a chart of how much money a Senator had to raise every week for their next race and it was stark bonkers (and this was in the 90s, before Citizens United). I just checked and the figure is even worse now. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/02/state-of-money-in-p...

From that article, victorious senate candidates have to spend an average of about 16 million. So if you are already a Senator looking forward to your next race you have to raise about 80k a week!. And you are not getting that kind of money from the average citizen.

Money in politics is the root of most of what ails the U.S political system (not all, but a very big part).

As an american, I really enjoy learning things like this about how other countries view us and our craziness. A lot of people here would be genuinely confused at the comparison.

>"If it happens in Africa it is called corruption. If it happens in the US it is called lobbying".

To add to this, we (americans) also never refer to our own elite class as oligarchs. That's reserved for other countries, because ours is a totally fair, democratic, and meritocratic society, and we're definitely not ruled by a small group of well connected rich people.

> As an american, I really enjoy learning things like this about how other countries view us and our craziness. A lot of people here would be genuinely confused at the comparison.

I'm puzzled by that. I thought it is generally well known Hollywood influences the Dems, and that the tobacco industry influenced politics in past (to name two examples).

> Money in politics is the root of most of what ails the U.S political system

I disagree that money is the root. Money is still one level above the true root, which is what the money is needed to buy: "Re-election." Thus, an alternative, though unconventional, solution is single-term limits. Once elected to any national public office, you can never run for that or any other elected office again. One and done.

This idea is not without it's share of potential problems, but I think that's true of any potential solution that has a chance of actually working. After thinking it through, I'm pretty sure I'd prefer the "single-term" set of potential downsides over the others.

Why would someone elected to office, who knows they can't run again, have any concern about the will of the people? At best you would have the same outcome that you get from politicians at the end of their terms, and it's not like these politicians are solving all of society's ailments.

If they can still get lobbying money by operating on the will of corporations, they could spend their whole term making money for themselves with no concern about re-election.

This solution just seems like hoping and praying the politicians we elect have higher regard for their legacy than their wallet.

I'm under perhaps the insane notion that politicking is a job, and when done well, the citizens see the benefit. No profession allows someone to work in it for two to six years, then never allows them to work in it again (aside from some nuclear-related jobs). Term limits have their place at the leadership level of their respective institutions (president, speaker of the house, president pro tempore, supreme court judge), but not for the rank and file politicians.

> Why would someone elected to office, who knows they can't run again, have any concern about the will of the people?

Reason #1 is the Princeton study cited in other posts:

> The key finding: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”[1]

It's already clear that "the will of the people" isn't being represented currently.

Reason #2 is "the will of the people" being reflected is not (and has never been) a design goal of the U.S. system of government. The U.S. was specifically created as a "representative democracy" and not a "direct democracy." This was debated extensively at the time of the founding of the country. They decided then (I think correctly), that it was better to have voters choose representatives, who, once elected, are supposed to vote what they personally think is genuinely the 'best' answer, not what they think 51% of their district's citizens want them to vote.

> they could spend their whole term making money for themselves with no concern about re-election.

This is already super against the law and congress members have gone to jail for it surprisingly often. The FBI has a special unit constantly searching, investigating and probing for any sign of it. At the same time as single-term limits, I would >10x the budget of these investigators. At least enough to ensure that more than one lobbyist meeting a year per legislator is a well-run Abscam-like sting operation and the politicians have no idea which one. I'd also substantially increase the jail time for such convictions, along with substantially increasing our one-term legislator's pay at least to $1M/year. The goal being to reduce the need to cheat while dramatically increasing the penalties for cheating.

Combined, the higher pay + higher penalties would have the effect of significantly increasing the $Cost to influence a legislator with money. While the single-term limit would greatly reduce the $Value of influencing a legislator. Having the ear of someone likely to be in power for many terms is much more valuable than having the ear of someone who's gonna be gone for sure next term. I think the combined result will substantially reduce the amount of illicit influence peddling, leaving our legislators free to simply vote their conscience - which is really the best result we can realistically hope for anyway. None of the "Suspiciously Got Very Rich While in Office" >5 term legislators accrued any significant wealth in their first term. Even with the current laws, penalties and underfunded FBI enforcement, the only way to get rich in congress is to do it over many terms.

If you really sit down and thoroughly ponder how single-term limits would actually play out in the real world, vs the results we are actually getting now (not what we should be getting), there are a lot of interesting impacts. For one, it's very likely to reduce the power of the two major duopoly political parties who've jointly controlled Washington for >50 years. While it would increase the viability of tertiary political parties who are currently irrelevant. It's also likely to increase incentives for tertiary parties to sometimes form meaningful alliances as we see in some European countries. Anytime anyone votes for any candidate OTHER than a Democrat or Republican, it's currently a wasted vote. Thus alternatives can't ever build any gradual, grassroots traction and things just grow increasingly polarized at the extremes.

Single term limits might not be a great idea, since new representatives will have to rely even more on people who've been around Washington a lot (i.e. lobbyists) to write legislation (since part of joining Congress is getting ramped up on a lot of tradition/things you have to learn on the job).

Public funding of elections would help - take the current $2 they ask you about on taxes, and make that $100 or so. Then give proportional time to candidates with publicly funded money.

The other counterintuitive one is to bring back the secret ballot in Congress. Publicizing voting records actually makes lobbying more effective since the lobbyists can measure effectiveness of their $$. If you brought back the secret ballot, people are more free to vote their conscience without having to take the brunt of the blame for it (lobbying really took off after the elimination of secret ballots in the early 70s)

This is why the revolving door exists. Do what we want and we'll give you a high paying job afterward. There are former congressman currently making $3 million a year as lobbyists as soon as they leave office.

There are already voluntary (but expected) commitments from cabinet members not to engage in lobbying for five years (I think, may be more) after leaving office. I would make these commitments rules and extend them to all legislators, while in exchange adding a nice yearly stipend in the years immediately after office and dramatically increasing legislator pay during their one term (>$1M/yr).

There's only 535 of these roles and as their employer (a voter), I'd much rather have them directly over-compensated by us voters than indirectly compensated by special interests. I think it's fair (and a good deal for voters) to basically buy an "exclusivity" agreement from our elected representatives by paying them openly to contractually commit to not monetize their influence or relationships after leaving office.

> "If it happens in Africa it is called corruption. If it happens in the US it is called lobbying".

It's the same here in Europe, we are joking how elites in US legalized corruption and called it lobbying, it's really weird for us (outside of US), that people just go along with this state of things and do nothing about it, like almost whole population would be after some kind of long period of brain washing in US.

That study has a lot of problems, and several subsequent problems pointed out the holes.

Here's a good summary of subsequent research that debunked it. https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...

Even if the study were true it shows that when economic elites (150k+) disagree with the middle class they get there way more often. (Btw it showed that the middle class and the rich agreed like 80-90% of the time on policy, and when they disagreed it wasn't by very many percentage points)

But a much more likely scenario than corruption is senators/representatives/presidents are all members of the economic elite, and all their friends are members of the elite and so it's no surprise they share the same opinions as their friends/wives/family members and socio-economic class.

How much are politicians paid —and how does their salary affect corruption?

It might not be a popular opinion, but perhaps we should double the wages of US Representatives (they currently make $175k—not a lot in Washington DC). Is paying US representatives $350k worth the money?

First, a bigger financial cushion for representatives might reduce financial corruption. Second, a bigger salary might attract more talented leaders. Potentially, paying higher salaries would increase the quality of US governance. God, imagine if we could just pay for increased quality in government leaders!

TIL that in 1789, the US president made $25k—- worth $800k in 2022. But today, the US president makes $400k. Why try to save money on presidents and politicians?

No modern politician survives solely on their gov't salary. Typically, politicians have money before starting out. Then, once in, they get all of those juicy "ins" that opens the doors to making more money.

I think we should pay them more. I just think getting better candidates would be much more influential than the reduction in corruption.

Most corruption isn't someone dropping off a bag of money. It's an organization donating a bunch of money so they can put somebody intelligent charming and attractive in front of the senator who is going to have a really good argument why certain provisions are good for their constituents.

I think we should pay all of our politicians more. Some state politicians are essentially volunteer positions. How are we supposed to get younger candidates into politics if you need to be not reliant on an external job that may not approve of your political activities?

It's essentially a remnant of aristocracy: you can only have a say in society if you have time to spare.

>"It might not be a popular opinion, but perhaps we should double the wages of US Representatives"

How about this: we can have some criteria like state of health, education, buying ability etc and call it well being index. If it increases politicians get a bonus. If it decreases they pay fine.

On what time scale? Government policies have effects that exceed term limits. If you want to reduce government to the same myopic view of CEOs, i.e. politicians that optimize for the next quarter only, this is how you would achieve it.

Why is that at all more likely?

Do you think it's unlikely that people share the same opinions as their family/friends/colleagues?

Or do you think it's very likely that most federal politicians are extremely corrupt and not getting caught?

Getting money out of politics would be a great reform (removing lobbyists, campaign finance reform, etc.). It also strikes me as almost impossible to implement. It's like getting the president of a company to switch to system whereby leadership is elected by the workers. It's all risk and low reward for them.

However, another political reform I've toyed with in my head is secret voting in the House and the Senate.

Who cares if Raytheon or Disney "owns" a given representative if those corporate sponsors can't actually be sure that they're getting the votes they paid for. It would also neutralize a lot of the petty party line votes and manipulation. Every issue would ostensibly be decided based on the representatives' actual value system.

Obviously the downside would be that the public at large would be unable to hold their representative accountable for a particular vote, but that seems like the lesser concern compared to the very obvious corporate vote buying and party-line bullshit that happens today.

How is that a lesser concern? How can the public have any influence over their politicians this way? You're saying corporations can choose who gets into power becasuse they finance them, and the public cant even tell what they're voting for to punish them. It seems all around worse.

I'm not sure - I think there's certainly an interesting truth that people act differently when you remove the pressures of public scrutiny.

In particular - they are much less likely to always blindly follow party lines, or corporate wishes, and I think there's value there.

How would you feel about a tweaked system? All votes are recorded, but the voting record is entirely withheld until 3 months before the next election for that seat.

The public is made aware of the voting record when it matters: During the next election. But during the term, they are much less susceptible to corporate donors and lobbyists, or pressure from members of their own party.

>In particular - they are much less likely to always blindly follow party lines, or corporate wishes, and I think there's value there.

I want the politician I vote for to more or less follow the party line on important votes. That's why I voted for her.

Personally - I think that's a shortsighted and naive approach. The "party" is not your friend. Politics are not team sports, and they shouldn't be treated that way.

I also think this leads to a preponderance of "division" politics - where the goal is to find a wedge issue that forces people to pick a side.

It's poor governance all around.

Because the corporations would no longer have a record that a politician actually voted in their favor. They would be donating to campaigns based on rhetoric alone. Therefor the representatives would have no incentive for voting anything but their conscience.

(Obviously disclosing your cryptographic vote receipt to a donor would be forbidden.)

Yes, but this would also apply to the electorate. Voters would have no record around what a politician actually voted for either. Which would seem to be hugely problematic for a system of representative democracy.

That only solves for explicit quid pro quos. It does nothing for the case where corporate sponsors donate to candidates who honestly signal during campaigning that they are the kind of candidate who cares about those sponsors' interests.

I think explicit quid pro quo is far less impactful/prevalent then pro-corporate donors simply looking at the pool of campaigners and putting weight behind candidates that look like they'll vote how the donors want. All that requires is for the donors to be able to at least partially predict future behavior from candidates' current appearance. Secret votes won't change anything on that view.

This is how things actually work.

Also, small dollar donors are driving polarization of US politics, so I'm not sure big donors are really the problem.

With regards to secret voting which scenario do you find more probable?

1) Politicians decide to pull a fast on corrupting interests and start voting in the interests of society instead of focusing primarily on what benefits themselves and special interests.

2) Politicians decide to pull a fast one on society and start defacto selling influence more than ever, given they can simply publicly claim they picked the "right" side of any given bill.

Secret voting is one of the characteristics of sortition[1] governance systems.

Just like on a jury for a court case, people are randomly selected from the population to sit on the legislature. They naturally vote their conscience, and when their term is up, they go back to their normal life. Because compliance with a bribers' instructions is unobservable, bribery is not incented.

The beauty of it is that you don't need to hold anyone "accountable" because there is no election, only random selection. Of course, the devil is in the details. Should prisoners be eligible for selection, or the illiterate?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I wonder if the Senate could pass a rule that allows them to choose when to take a secret vote. I don't know of anything in the Constitution that prohibits such.

The Senate routinely takes voice votes for which no rollcall division is recorded.

But there is generally little incentive to make votes private because in general legislators want to engage in credible credit-claiming (including about margins of passage and rates of bipartisanship) and parties want to preserve the whip as well.

As I understand it, just as in the Commons here, although it's technically possible to do this for a controversial issue it's basically pointless, and so it's actually used when it's obvious how the vote will go and nobody cares.

You don't need a rollcall to know why you lost if not even enough people were in favour of your proposition to even force the actual count.

The intended reform would be that the rollcall would happen, yet the details (beyond a total Yes/No count) would not be released, presumably even to the voters themselves. This is a problem because it's hard to maintain trust in such a system.

For popular elections the scale is such that election monitors on behalf of interested parties can easily see a bunch of administrators correctly tallying votes and not focus in on the fact that, hey, voter #283204349 picked Jim Smith for Grand Leader -- however when you're talking about exactly 100 senators that's surely much harder to get right.

What? Republicans in Congress will routinely vote against funding legislation and then show up at ribbon cuttings bragging how they fought to get the funding for their district. Just out and out lie about voting for it.

The Constitution provides open ended and vague language allowing both chambers to set their own rules for conducting business, so yeah, both could.

In the US, wouldn't that require a constitutional amendment? I thought Citizens United declared money to be free speech (paraphrasing) .

Yes, Citizens United made it explicit that money is speech and as such can't be hindered. I suspect that because of this ruling, we couldn't just pass a law that prohibits money in politics because the ruling precludes it.

A constitutional amendment would nuke the current limitations, but it's impossible in practice for us to get there. On the other hand, as we've seen as of late, no decision by the Supreme Court is set in stone, so we could, in theory, get Citizens rolled back and then some. That also seems unlikely in the short term.

Congress could fix it if they really wanted to. Make a law that essentially reverses the interpretation of Citizens United, and then take it out of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

Not that this is in any way likely to happen, of course.

If such a law were passed (and I agree, it's extremely unlikely), I expect that litigation would be filed as to it's constitutionality. Which would put the ball back in the Supreme Court's court, so to speak.

I'd like to see how that would work. In the past, SCOTUS has acknowledged that the Constitution indeed grants Congress the ability to remove legislation from the court's jurisdiction.

Notably, the Constitution does not grant the court the power of judicial review. The court granted itself that right. So in a battle between precedent and the text of the Constitution, I hope the latter would win.

While this is the common shorthand, what actually happened is pretty different. The ruling is people don't lose their rights when acting as a group. John Smith, Girl Scout troop#2365, and Bank Of America are all equally protected to create and publish a Pro or anti politician message. There isn't really a law that can just say money isn't speech, because that doesn't change anything.

I like the idea of "blind" or anonymous congressional voting. It feels counterintuitive, but donors might be less willing to "buy" votes if they can't confirm that they're getting what they pay for. And a representative who has accepted lots of corporate money might feel safer "betraying" those donors.

I think representatives would still feel pressure to vote in line with the interests of their constituents and get results, otherwise they get replaced by the next exciting candidate.

Your solution eliminates accountability to donors, but it also eliminates accountability to voters.

Both houses essentially have this. It is called a voice vote.

How will voters know whether their reps are voting for the right things though

They wouldn't! That's the downside. Or maybe not a downside -- there could be an even stronger incentive for politicians to get stuff done. Since voters would have to make their decisions based entirely actual results, and not an individual politician's voting record, the politicians might have a stronger incentive to build coalitions and influence other politicians' votes.

My half-baked point is that the harm of voters NOT having access to this information is less than the harm of lobbyists and major donors having access to it.

That doesn’t really work though, people vote for their rep, not some amorphous party blob.

On the other hand, it gives pols plausible deniability that they aren’t getting bought out.

I should point out that places like Germany do vote for the party, not the person for positions like Parliament. In each region the parties submit slates of people they would put into the positions if they got all of the votes, and then once people vote they get a proportionate number of their slate into actual offices. There are lots of details here, but it is a system that works.

They vote for both party and person in MMP. Voters submit both a party list preference and a candidate preference.

Any differential privacy experts care to weigh in? Is there a differential privacy method that can introduce a specific amount of noise in voting results in order to not fully hide nor fully reveal specific representative voting records?

What they say and how they behave. I really don't believe there are a relevant number of people who can consistently say one thing and vote a completely different thing for years on end.

Maybe I'm naive, though. I really do think nearly everyone in congress does want to make the world a better place, they're just lost/confused about how to go about that, often getting caught up in the game of staying in congress rather than using their time there for good.

It's actually how congress worked before the "sunshine" act of 1971 which made voting records public.

The vast majority of people don't actually go and look up their senator's/congressperson's voting records, where as lobbyists do. So I think the voter disclosure argument is overblown; I don't think that voters actually need to know the exact voting records of their congressperson. I think voting should be selecting people based on character and rhetoric and then letting those people act as representatives.

It would be less democratic, but more functional (and more akin to what the founders imagined anyway).

I'd prefer the regular public voting and a secret non-binding vote. You'd get a lot of information out of the secret vote telling you what representatives really thought. Especially if it were a landslide in the secret ballot and down party lines in the public one. You can think of plenty of examples of past issues that would have gone that way.

In firing squads, one rifle holds a blank to preserve the possibility in the hearts of the shooters that theirs was not the shot that killed.

I imagine blind voting would also serve to assuage the worries of legislators. If only we knew what each worried about.

Firing squad members don’t usually fire more than one bullet, and it’s very obvious if your case was blank or not.

Not sure quite what you mean. It sounds like list voting, is that it?

I don't know how exactly it would work, I just mean a system where only the final vote tallies are made public -- not WHO voted for what.

Trotsky explained this nearly a hundred years ago in arguing the dictatorship of the proletariat to Karl kantskys point of contention to the revolution of the working class. the Princeton study could best be summarized as scientific evidence of his conclusion

disclosure: I am a communist and find little value in capitalist reformations.

Yes I'm sure China or Russia would be *thrilled* if their citizens wanted workers to own the means of production. Definitely would not involve tanks or squares or soon-to-be iconic historical photography at all.

China is called the CCP… if Russia and China aren’t communists or communist friendly then who is? And why won’t you accept the proposition that americas problems might be due to a poor implementation of capitalism but then call all unattractive communist countries just “poor implementations of communism?”

China isn’t communist. China is a one-party state with state-controlled capitalism. The name CCP is only historical and fuels propaganda. Instead of looking at names, look at the actual economics of the country.

Russia is a capitalist state, full stop, period. The West made sure of that in the 90s, remember?

Wouldn't this be solved rather easily by prohibiting fund raising and using tax dollars to finance campaigns? Everyone gets the same budget? That means money has no sway over politicians and money can't influence the result unfairly.

Unless Citizens United is overturned, this would take a constitutional amendment, "money is speech" per that Supreme Court verdict and so...

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So this puts us as requiring a constitutional amendment since only that can carve out an exception to something earlier in the constitution (see the 21st amendment which repealed prohibition) and unfortunately constitutional amendments have an extremely high bar to clear to make them happen. Not just a "half of the bastards finally agree" like a regular law ...

Per article 5 of the constitution:

> Amendments may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate; or by a convention to propose amendments called by Congress at the request of two-thirds of the state legislatures. To become part of the Constitution, an amendment must then be ratified by either—as determined by Congress—the legislatures of three-quarters of the states or by ratifying conventions conducted in three-quarters of the states

75 percent of the state congresses have to agree to it on top of 2/3 of the federal congress.

It will never happen short of some apocalyptic social shift.

Yeah, I don't like your odds here. Your politicians can barely agree on a budget these days. Constitutional amendments seem like a thing of the past now. But it's likely the only good solution here, and on other issues too, like abortion.

They really do seem like a thing from history. If you chart both how far apart each of them are in ratification date and time from the start of the process for ratification to the fine they get finally ratified you see this steady increase over time.

Would you enforce that on “friends of the campaign” as well? E.g. Political Action Committees. John Jackson is running for political office using only public money. However, Big Titanium Inc. creates the privately run and funded “Friends of John Jackson” organization that is entirely unaffiliated with John Jackson but nevertheless runs pro-John Jackson ads in TV.

And if that's clamped down on, they just run increasingly vague ads that don't mention a candidate by name, but are clearly boosting the person/party/side they want to see succeed. A lot of people--particularly Democrats--like to say the Supreme Court got Citizens United wrong, but there's no way to get money out of politics while still maintaining any level of free speech.

Yes.

The issue with this and any proposal is that the people making the decision have no incentive to make it. Politicians limiting their own fundraising, establishing term limits, eliminating gerrymandering, etc. - it goes against their interests.

It's up to us to vote in people who would do this, but as pointed out, it's become difficult to do so in one election for one candidate, let alone the hundreds over the span of several years necessary to get people in place to actually make something positive happen.

That would presumably require a Constitutional amendment to carve out an exception in the 1st Amendment. So not easy.

https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-uni...

Yeah, I'm of the firm opinion that the US is a second world plutocracy that masquerades as a first world democracy by using its military might.

The concept of being the best country in the world (American exceptionalism [0]) is not rooted in fact. In actuality, it's propaganda designed to keep people within US borders instead of seeing them flee to much greener pastures around the globe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

Campaigns need money because voters choose to be governed according to TV ads. This choice certainly frustrates elite nerds like HN readers and Larry Lessig. But it's tough to call it any less legitimate than other exercises of democratic power. To be governed by the people is to be governed by the decision-making heuristics natural to the people. In politics inclusive of everyday people, policy is going to play a minor role. That's how people are.

> The test for democracy is whether elected politicians pass legislation that the public at large wishes to be passed.

What happens if the majority of Americans want to pass laws against their best interest?

What happens if the majority of Americans want to pass laws that are deeply immoral?

> What happens if the majority of Americans want to pass laws against their best interest?

Democracy and good judgment are orthogonal concerns.

> What happens if the majority of Americans want to pass laws that are deeply immoral?

Democracy and morality of policy are orthogonal concerns.

I'm thinking if "group identity" would be a middle ground: a few representatives belong to a group, e.g. "north texas", they vote anonymously and nobody van see their votes, but the summary vote of the group is visible to everyone.

Here is a short video about that study for people that like more video content than written content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6w9CbemhVY

> The test for democracy is whether elected politicians pass legislation that the public at large wishes to be passed.

Isn’t that just rule of the majority? Since when has that been a test of a republic?

> The short version is that to win primaries you need money.

And he's wrong.

_That_ problem is caused by the lack of choice. The corruption is the laws passed to entrench the Republican and Democratic party as the only two practical choice on every ballot. The lack of accountability is a direct result of that and nearly all other sources of dysfunction stems from it. The amount of compromise every voter has to make to support their platform of least disgust is the problem.

You can have your candidates in any color you like, so long as that color is blue/red.

Marx saw this problem 100 years ago. Democracy under capitalism is just a mechanism for settling disputes among the ruling class.

Propose a practical solution.

As opposed to democracy under one party communist rule? Who cares what Marx said, when we have history of his ideas being tried in Russia, China, North Korea, etc.

And in one of those three it resulted in an unprecedented growth and quality of life increase. Also North Korea is a monarchy, it’s only a “cultural communism”.

> The short version is that to win primaries you need money. Money mainly comes from corporations and rich people. Taking money from corporations and rich people creates a relationship where you have some loyalty to them or they can punish you if you don't act how they want.

If this was ever correct, it’s certainly wrong today. Trump, for example, was primarily funded by small donors: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/us/politics/trump-fundrai...

That’s arguably a major force that’s destabilizing politics today. Technology makes it super easy to raise hundreds of millions from small donors. But the Act Blue and Win Red donors represent the most ideological segment of their respective parties. That creates a huge incentive to try and play to try Twitter audience by taking extreme positions. Going viral can be worth millions of dollars.

Yet another thing Democrats fight against and Republicans support

I have heard that same argument elsewhere too, it would also explain why it took a populist outsider like Trump to break through that system while someone like Bernie on the other side couldn't.

IMO, politicians are doing exactly what the people are asking for, which is spending their time virtue signalling rather than writing and negotiating meaningful legislation. Besides that, they do care about handouts, which is why we have so much pork barrel spending and stimulus checks.

It's convenient to blame money in politics, but if that were the case, Congress would at least get something done. For example, Facebook, despite being one of the most heavy lobbying spenders, has spent even more money establishing their content Oversight Board. If they could actually buy politicians, we'd have more regulation that happens to benefit big tech. Both the Republican solution of not allowing social media companies to censor content and the Democratic solution of creating more rules for moderate disinformation are beneficial to Facebook because they can offload some of the responsibility of moderation to the government.

I mostly agree but there isn’t really such a thing as beneficial regulation for tech companies. No rules is always the cheapest and easiest to implement. For example, why would a company even bother with disinformation in the first place if it wasn’t required by the government? You could argue for social reasons or say if you wanted your website to be like Wikipedia, that it serves some purpose, however trying to turn Facebook into Wikipedia seems like a gross misstep.

I don’t think Bernie sanders lost entirely because he didn’t get his funding from rich people or corporations. Democrats don’t like to admit that you also need the approval of the corrupt political bodies that decide everyone ie the DNC.

Yes, the DNC uses superdelegates, which is an undemocratic part of the process. But in both 2016 and 2020, Sanders did poorly enough in the regular primaries that the number of superdelegates was irrelevant to the final outcome.

As much as I hate to say it, and as someone who very much would like to have seen Sanders win either of those primaries, much of America is further to the right than Sanders, and seemingly have no desire to learn the difference between social democracy and socialism.

> Yes, the DNC uses superdelegates, which is an undemocratic part of the process. But in both 2016 and 2020, Sanders did poorly enough in the regular primaries that the number of superdelegates was irrelevant to the final outcome.

Superdelegates who had made public announcements were, through 2016, usually counted in running delegate counts by media and not distinguished from pledged delegates. Because the perception of winning votes is...actually, empirically, a powerful means of winning more votes, this meant the superdelegates were a significant influence on winning pledged delegates.

Because Sanders did so well in 2016, his faction won major concessions in DNC rules, including the erasing of first-ballot superdelegate voting rights (well, in the circumstances where they could matter). As a result, their collective thumbs were lifted off the nominating process in 2020 (now, Sanders did worse in 2020 anyway, both the situation and the field of primary candidates were different.)

I'm sure its not an original idea but I always thought a more "fair" system would be all 18+ citizens would automatically be entered in a lottery every year that would fill 1/5 of the seats of a unicameral legislature of 500 seats. The winners would be given something insane, like $1 billion dollars for each member, at the end of 5 years of service with a yearly stipend of $1 million a year during their service. This would get money out of politics the only way I can think of, which is randomly injecting ridiculous amounts to random people.

This general idea is known as "sortition", and actually has quite a long history. In the United States, and many countries, sortition still has a role–people are randomly selected for jury duty.

However, in ancient Athens, one could become a magistrate (~a small-town mayor in modern times) through random selection. There was a term limit of one year, and you were only allowed to serve once in a lifetime. You also had to go through a basic examination called the dokimasia to be deemed competent.

Several other civilizations have used this method over history, typically with the intention of preventing corruption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

Agreed. I've always felt such a randomized selection is the only way to have a representative set of people.

The people in legislative positions have a lot of power and there is no way to prevent that since the whole point is for them to have power to run the country.

Thus, it inherently attracts the sort of people who crave power and influence, which is exactly the sort of people who should not be allowed to have it.

So the only solution I can think of is to make it impossible to actively seek those positions of power, by assigning them randomly.

Am I reading this right? We're going to pay $100Bn per year to 100 people chosen at random to run the country?

Why would they have any incentive to do a good job?

Also, why would they have any desire?

Also, that seems like a lot of money. >95% of people would be happy with the $1M per year salary.

I think the point was more about reducing the saliency of bribes/lobbying than the particular dollar amount.

The number needs to be effectively an unbribeable number.

If you're selected for public service, then you're expected to do good for the country, and not just a specific monied interest. And that means not having to worry about money ever again. You win capitalism. Done. Have fun. Live your life.

That could also be done with annuities so that they get a "allowance" each month until dead.

Why wouldn't you take the money AND the bribes?

If you have a system in place that can find and punish bribes - why not pay them a reasonable amount of money - and just eliminate bribes without spending $0.1T per year...

Bribes need to increase proportionate to salary to maintain the same risk/reward calculation.

Famously, Singapore maintains a very effective, clean civil service by paying market rates, and sometimes for some ministers that is actually millions of dollars a year.

Okay, but are they choosing these people at random?

Your worth should be based on your skills (meritocracy) - not by winning the lottery and how much people will pay to influence you (luck).

> Your worth should be based on your skills (meritocracy)

And with deciding "merit" are the kingmakers, or the "meritmakers".

Congratulations. You now have created a new class of people who can take bribes and subvert leadership under the term "merit".

And, explain how one would calculate "merit"? In my experiences, meritocracies are monocultures that put forth their own biases as "merit".

people assume people will be satisfied with any (large) amount of money.

1: money isn't the only form of bribery.

2: people who want more... will always want more and will never stop taking.

3: there is no good way to tell a person from someone who wants to give to help, and someone who wants to give to get something in return.

A more effective if morally dark methodology is publicly and viscously execute people who take bribes in this system.

If winning at capitalism was an antidote to the desire to do dodgy deals, we wouldn't have to worry about the effect of moneyed interests on politics in the first place.

As it is, I'm not sure the billion does anything other than ensure that the one policy absolutely every randomly-appointed political figure from the vague woolly liberal to the literal neo-Nazi agrees upon is zero inheritance tax...

Man, if social media is any indication of how ordinary people would govern, I'm not sure it's a great thing. Granted, maybe ordinary people are quite a lot more moderate or emotionally stable than the likes of Twitter and Reddit.

Whose original idea is it?

I actually think it's a wonderful thought puzzle at the least.

The two problems I have with it though, are reflected in Lincoln's 1st inaugural address:

* His criticism of the idea that only the Supreme Court can determine constitutionality: the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal

* His assertion that rule by a minority leads to tyranny or despotism.

If the thought puzzle could be extended by substituting the current closed party primary system with random selection initially - but still have a general election to choose among those candidates, you might find a way of creating a random-democracy hybrid.

I believe this would defeat the purpose of sortition. Giving all representatives such a large amount of money would instantly make them unrepresentative of the population they were selected from. They would all be in the uber-wealthy class, and be incented to make laws that favor that small subset of people.

> Taking money from corporations and rich people creates a relationship where you have some loyalty to them or they can punish you if you don't act how they want.

This gets thrown around a lot, but how often does this actually happen? I feel like we all assume it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if this specific form of corruption were a lot less common than we think.

The notable exception to this, of course, is Trump's primary AND general elections.

Trump spent hundreds of millions of dollars officially, outside groups that don't need to report all of their spending (like the NRA) spent further hundreds of millions, and he had hundreds of millions worth of "earned media" due to the circus-like nature of the campaign.

Because he spent marginally less than Ted Cruz in the primary and less than Hillary in the general doesn't give lie to the premise at all. His 2020 reelection campaign spent ~$1 billion when including independent expenditures!

Trump is still proof an outsider can win. He needed money but someone outside the political class still came in and won despite his parties best efforts against it (at the beginning when he was just a primary candidate they made their bed with his now).

"outsider" trump couldn't be outside himself... if he ever found the will to try he would just reflected back at himself thanks to his Lovecraftian narcissism.

“An outsider”? Trump is a billionaire who has been directly involved in politics for decades.

If anything doesn't he represent a more direct "taking of the reins" by the lobbyist/corpo class? Even most lifer politicians themselves are more "outsiders" than he is/was.

It's weird that people believe he is a political outsider. I've never heard a holistic/logical argument showing he is somehow more divested or decoupled from the implicit oligarchy class that ultimately is deciding legislation/law/executive orders these days.

I guess it's because he's bounced around parties and people are really firmly sold on the republican/democrat binary, seems superficial to me but I'd be willing to hear any cogent argument made.

I prefer those with more resources to have more say over the running of our country. On average in a free market those with more resources are better organized and know what’s best for the country. Furthermore the structure of society should be organized to help those that know what they are doing. An unpopular opinion however.

> On average in a free market those with more resources are better organized and know what’s best for the country.

They know what is best for them. It has nothing to do with what is best for the country.

As you are advocating for an oligarchy, I suggest you take a look at all the oligarchies around the world: don't you notice that they are all, without exception, terrible places to live, and not even good places for striving economies? Surely, there must be some fault in your reasoning.

On the contrary, most great countries in the world have something in common: they tend to be democratic, they tend to be quite equal in the distribution of income, and they also tend to be run as social democracies.

We are democratic. I’m advocating for letting capital invest in politicians and advertise their positions freely. $20 donations from a widespread group of people can also make their opinions heard effectively.

If you seized all of Bill Gates’ wealth it would fund the USA for 3 months. Do you think making Gates a pauper to fund our profligate politicians is more effective than letting Gates keep his wealth and invest as he sees fit?

I would argue Bill Gates is 10000x a better allocator of resources than the government. So maybe let him keep his wealth considering the government prints his net worth every month.

It's not just an unpopular opinion, it also shows an utter lack of critical thinking.

Do those with more resources owe them to chance, or did they do actual work?

Of those who worked for more resources, how did they achieve those resources? Are those ways actually in any way beneficial to society at large, or are they not replicable across wide swaths? Or are they possibly deliberately not beneficial to the country, but to those with resources?

Is it possible that growing wealth is easier if you already have access to wealth, merely by having that access?

Why do you think people with more resources actually know what they are doing? There is plentiful evidence to the contrary. (See e.g. Enron)

There is nothing inherent in a free market that means people with more resources are somehow more qualified to lead a country. Maybe they are, maybe they are not, but if you'd like to make that point, you'll need to go well beyond a simple declaration of faith.

Is it reasonable to assume that the wealthiest people are more interested in optimizing society for what is best for the country as a whole or optimizing it so they can acquire more wealth/power? How often are those two possible optimizations in conflict?

I think it is an unpopular opinion for two primary reasons. There are inherent conflicts of interest. Being good at one thing (often being really good at being born with the right parents) does not necessarily correlate with decision making on behalf of society at large.

If anything, people with a track record of amassing wealth should be treated with more suspicion on entering public service.

If all of their other decisions are geared toward increasing their wealth, one has to wonder whether the decision to enter public service is also geared toward increasing their own wealth.

> On average in a free market those with more resources are better organized and know what’s best for the country.

No, they don't, and there's not a rational or logical reason to infer they do.

So a plutocracy

fortunately there are hundreds of countries already in existence for you to choose from that use this exact system!

There is a sibling comment explaining why you might not actually want to live in an oligarchy, but regardless of your preference, there are a couple of flaws in your logic.

First. The greatest predictor of individual wealth is their parents’ wealth. This undermines the whole notion of the free market (or at least in its current state) giving rise to a meritocracy.

Second. Statistically, in a completely free and fair economy where all trade is zero-sum and every player will either loose or gain from a trade is up to pure chance, the money in the economy will accumulate to fewer and fewer hands as the number of trades increase. This is a pure statistical phenomena, meaning that as long as some players have more wealth then others, those players have an upper hand in any future trades for that reason only.

The meritocracy of capitalism is a pretty well debunked theory at this point.

Maybe compounding interest should be outlawed

If player1 can make the same widget with less resources than player2, its not zero-sum. That does often entail that player1 has some advantage, which could be any number of things. Is that OK?

This has nothing to do with compounding interest.

It happens because the less wealthy player has a lot more to loose then gain in an unequal economy. That is even if a trade outcome is favorable to the less wealthy player, it is unlikely that the outcome is significant enough to change the balance. However it is much more likely if an outcome is unfavorable that it will significantly hinder any future opportunities for the poorer player.

On the other hand, a loss for the wealthier player is unlikely to significantly effect future outcomes for them. The only likely way for a wealthy player to have a significant loss if they land a devastatingly bad deal with another equally or more wealthy player. The chances of that happening at random is pretty low overall, and gets lower the wealthier you are.